How much data the NSA really gets

Fear not, says the NSA[2], we “touch” only 1.6% of daily internet[3] traffic. If, as they say, the net carries 1,826 petabytes of information per day, then the NSA[4] “touches” about 29 petabytes a day. They don’t say what “touch” means. Ingest? Store? Analyze?

For context, Google in 2010 said it had indexed[5] only 0.004% of the data on the net. So, by inference from the percentages, does that mean that the NSA is equal to 400 Googles?

Seven petabytes of photos are added[6] to Facebook each month. That’s .23 petabytes per day. So that means the NSA is 126 Facebooks.

Keep in mind that most of the data passing on the net is notemail[7] or web pages. It’s media. According[8] to Sandvine data (pdf)[9] for the US fixed net from 2013, real-time entertainment accounted for 62% of net traffic, P2P file-sharing for 10.5%.